Home Burial by Michael McGriff Page A

on the clearest days,
    even when the river runs low and clean,
    you can’t see it,
    though you can often nearly see
    the movement of hair.

    I used to move through my days
    as someone agreeable
    to all the gears
    clicking in the world.
    I was a big clumsy Yes
    tugged around by its collar.
    Yes to the mill, yes to the rain,
    yes to what passed
    for fistfights and sex, yes
    to all the pine boards of thought
    waiting around for the hammer.
    The catfish have the night
    and ancient gear oil for blood,
    they have a kind of greased demeanor
    and wet electricity
    that you can never boil out of them.

    The catfish have the night,
    but I have the kind of patience
    born of indifference and hate.

    Maybe the river and I share this.

    Maybe the obvious moon
    that bobs near the lip of the eddy
    is really a pocket watch
    having finally made its way downstream
    from what must have been
    a serious accident—
    the station wagon and its family
    busting the guardrail,
    the steering wheel jumping
    into the man’s chest,
    his pocket watch hurtling
    through the windshield
    and into the river.

    Wind the hands in one direction
    and see into the exact moment of your death.

    Wind them the other way
    and see all the tiny ways
    you’ve already died—
    I’m going to put this in my breast pocket
    just as it is. Metal heart
    that will catch the stray bullet
    in its teeth.

    I chum the water, I thread the barb.
    I feel something move in the dark.

My Family History as Explained by the South Fork of the River

    My grandfather says
    he stepped out of his dream
    the same day my grandmother did.
    In this way they entered the world.

    If you put your ear to his chest
    you’d hear something so absolute
    that you’d leave for the river
    enter the salmon run
    and disappear through the keyhole
    at the river bottom.

    He tells me
    I never had a mother.

    My mother has always said
    that after her mother died giving birth
    and became a reflection
    in a mud puddle
    that my grandfather
    turned into a dog
    who spent the rest of its life
    drinking from the pools
    in gravel roads.

    My grandmother
    says my mother
    can find anything.

    She says my mother is a water witch,
    and that’s why she leaves us
    for days at a time
    and comes home ragged
    and soaked with rainwater.
    My mother has a special branch
    that follows the water.

    My grandfather says
    I was never born at all,
    that I’m just borrowing this body
    until something better comes along.

    He says I’m half bird
    and half fish.

    He says there’s a house
    beneath the river,
    that I’m in a riddle
    where a boy flies
    in two skies at the same time.

In February

    She looks at the apple trees
    and imagines rows of people
    standing in line for something.
    She even dreamt once
    of being among them,
    waiting patiently to enter
    the open doorway
    of the earth, which shone
    with a light so forgiving
    it could have spoken.

    Her son’s been dead
    nearly a year, and yesterday
    while driving to the feed store
    she braked suddenly
    and threw her arm
    across the rib cage
    of his absence.

    The ice grows down the ruts
    of the gravel driveway.
    The possum by the well
    frozen in place
    for over a week.
    Wood smoke hangs
    halfway up the trees,
    the air is still.

    Gunshots can be heard for miles,
    and every kind of water
    and laughter.

New Season

    Beside our neighbor’s half-framed barn
    the hip bones of a dead deer continue
    to be stripped and polished by the rain,
    an arc of gray electricity
    traveling between them.

    And the water
    collecting in the ashtray on the porch
    isn’t a lake, but it’s big enough for God
    to stick his thumb in.

    I admire the rats in the wall.
    They rejoice in the night.
    They call to each other
    as they work.

Sunday

    Something anvil-like
    something horselike
    knee-deep and gleaming
    in the flooded pasture.

    The smell of fence posts and barn-rot.
    Culverts and tow chains.

    My mother and her illness.
    My father and his